Early Morning

Remembering My Father, William Stafford

A prolific writer, a famous pacifist, a respected teacher, and a literary mentor to many, William Stafford is one of the great American poets of the twentieth century. His first major collection, Traveling Through the Dark, won the National Book Award. He published more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose and was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a position now known as poet laureate. Before his death in 1993, he gave his son Kim the greatest gift and challenge: to be his literary executor.

In Early Morning, Kim creates an intimate portrait of a father and son who shared many passions—archery, photography, carpentry, and finally, writing itself. But Kim also confronts the great paradox at the center of William Stafford’s life. The public man, the poet who was always communicating with warmth and feeling—even with strangers—was capable of profound, and often painful, silence within the family. By piecing together a collage of his personal and family memories, and sifting through thousands of pages of his father’s daily writing and poems, Kim illuminates a fascinating and richly lived life.

Praise

“A vivid, affectionate memoir.”

— Library Journal

“For anyone who has read William Stafford’s verse and marveled at the way he could capture the pulse and power of life, his son’s words help reveal the source of that power.”

Kim Stafford has taught since 1979 at Lewis and Clark College, where he is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute and codirector of the documentary studies program. He also serves as the literary executor for the estate of William Stafford. He has worked as an oral historian, letterpress printer, editor, photographer, teacher, and visiting writer in communities and at colleges across the country, and in Italy, Scotland, and Bhutan. Stafford has published a dozen books of...